AliExpress
A bulk ordering workflow that does not lose order IDs
The bottleneck in dropshipping is not placing orders. It is the bookkeeping around placing orders, and specifically maintaining the link between what you bought and who it is for.
Where the link breaks
You work through a list, placing orders. Somewhere around the twelfth one the phone rings, and when you come back you are not sure whether you placed the one you were on.
Now you have a customer order with no supplier order, or two supplier orders for one customer. Both are expensive and neither announces itself.
Record the id at the moment of purchase
The single discipline that prevents most of this: write the supplier order id into the row before moving to the next order. Not at the end of the session. Immediately.
Batch-recording at the end relies on memory of a sequence you were interrupted in the middle of, which is exactly the thing that failed.
The sequence that holds up
- Sort by dispatch deadline, soonest first
- Take the top row and place that one supplier order
- Paste the supplier order id into the row
- Mark the row as bought
- Only then move to the next row
Steps three and four before step five is the whole discipline. It feels slower and it is faster, because reconciliation afterwards costs far more than the few seconds it saves.
Buy against the deadline, not the arrival order
Working in the order things arrived means the oldest unbought order may not be the most urgent one. Sorting by deadline puts your effort where the risk is.
Compound orders need explicit handling
Sometimes one customer order becomes two supplier orders - a bundle, or an item from two suppliers. Your sheet needs to hold both ids against that row, or it needs two rows.
What it must not do is hold one id and pretend the other does not exist, which is what happens when the column only fits one value.
The verification pass
At the end of a session, filter for rows marked as needing a purchase with no supplier order id. That list should be empty.
It takes ten seconds and it catches the interruption case, which is the one that otherwise surfaces days later as a customer asking where their item is.